A New Face of Western Imperialism - by Yoginder Sikand

Some months ago I wrote an article on western Christian
evangelical groups active in various Muslim countries, pointing out
how many of them were actively working for promoting the strategic
interests of Western governments, particularly the United States. I
had been careful to buttress my arguments with ample quotations from
Christian sources themselves so as not to appear to be making any
unsubstantiated claims.<

Normally, the Muslims in India are hand in glove with the
missionaries as part of the wider anti-Hindu alliance. And as a
missionary religion itself, Islam would naturally oppose anti-
conversion laws. Yet, lately the Muslims have found themselves on
the losing side in the conversion equation. Hindus could learn a
thing or two from the missionaries' succesful infiltration in Muslim
communities and baptism of surprisingly high numbers of otherwise
inconvertible Muslims. Especially in Kashmir the figures are
impressive. So now at last the international antagonism between
Christianity and Islam is making itself felt in India too. Possibly
because both are starting to treat the formerly majoritarian Hindus
as increasingly irrelevant, but that's another matter. At any rate,
a skillful Hindu strategist ought to be able to make good use of this
emerging Muslim-Christian antagonism.

Meanwhile, I would like to draw your attention to my article on how
to deal with certain new tactics of the Church. Originally written
for an audience of British Hindus involved in a deepening conflict
with Church strategists, it may be of interest to others as well.

kind regards,

Koenraad Elst

How to deal with clever Christian missionaries

The ongoing commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade in the
British empire (1807) is being used by Christian missionary circles
as an occasion for Hindu-bashing through the theme of caste
oppression as a still-existing form of slavery. Hindu polemicists
typically react by highlighting the human-rights abuses committed by
Christians or in the name of Christianity through the centuries:
witch-burning, persecution of pagans and heretics, racism, apartheid
and of course the slave trade itself. The intended implication is
that Christians are morally in no position to berate Hindus for their
social injustices and had better not meddle in inter-Hindu matters.
This may be a correct and convincing position to take in front of a
neutral or as yet uninformed audience, but with Christians who know
their religion, it is hopelessly ineffective.

Whereas Christian missionaries have invested heavily in studying
Hindu society and its subsets as defined by language, caste or social
class, most Hindus including anti-conversion activists are unfamiliar
with the Christian mentality. Hindu polemicists listen to their own
and each other's words and then think: how great, how clever. But if
you want to get a message across to an audience, you should listen to
the effect you're having on this audience. So, as an ex-Christian
and still daily in touch with Christian circles, I would like to
point out certain beliefs and attitudes that immunize Christians
against the charge of being no better than Hindus with their caste
oppression.

First of all, the historical facts and present eyesores which you
want to shove into their faces and of which you expect that they will
shock & awe Christians into silence about caste, are already widely
known and acknowledged. On the 900th anniversary of the Crusades, a
perfectly justified Christian reaction against Muslim imperialism,
numerous Christians indulged a guilt trip and said sorry to the
Muslims. But most of all, they impressed it upon themselves (far
more thoroughly than you could hope to do) what evil sinners they had
been back then, and how this should spur them into being nice to
today's Muslims. To Christians, past sins are a matter for
repentance vis-à-vis God, but ultimately only the normal course
of
things, since we're all sinners. So they are not uptight about
having sins on their record and won't be blackmailed about this.
Secondly, repentance about sins past is proven precisely by a
commitment to avoid and combat similar sins in the present. It is
not enough to say your confession of sins, you have to resolve to
undo the sins' consequences and go out of your way to remove them
from this world. So, precisely because Christians have been guilty
of slave-trading etc., they have a duty to combat similar inequality
now. And this must not be limited to their own backyard, for sins
are both by commission as by omission, i.e. standing by passively
when others get away with committing them. Because of their past
sins, they feel obliged to meddle in your sins today. Just as after
abolishing the slave trade and then slavery itself in the British
Empire, the British felt obliged to go out and impose its abolition
on the Ottomans, the Arabs and others. This is a moral imperative.
In missionary-speak: "We have been part of the problem so now we
must
become part of the solution."

Hindus could have guilt-tripped modern Westerners into
leaving the injustices of Hindu society alone if they had been
Africans or Muslims. More perceptive Westerners would not be
inhibited versus these two either (Muslims traded black, white and
Indian slaves; while Africans enslaved and sold off their own
brethren to Arab and European slave-traders), but most of them, and
especially politicians, don't dare to speak against those two
groups. But Hindus are a different matter altogether.

Hindu polemicists talk about "white racism" as if they are
totally oblivious to the torrent of anti-racist re-education that has
swept Western society in the past half century. The problem is not
just that Hindus cultivate an anachronistic world-view, apparently
drawing a good feeling about themselves from pretending to live in
the colonial age and occupying the moral high ground of the anti-
colonial struggle. This is bad enough, for movements based on self-
deception stand defeated from the very start; but in the present
case, it also blinds them to the transformation of anti-racism from a
force working in favour of the standing of non-European peoples to
one that actually makes things worse for them. Or at least for those
among them who have a solid reputation of racism, viz. the Hindus.
It is precisely anti-racism that makes Westerners self-righteous vis-
à-vis Hindus. Whereas social injustice in Western or even in Muslim
society is duly recognized, it doesn't have the extreme stigma of the
caste system because the latter is conceived as a form of racism. In
the past, I have argued left and right that the basis of caste is not
racial, but who am I? International organizations and influential
observers keep on repeating that the caste system is a huge instance
of racial apartheid. And this much must be conceded, that it is at
any rate hereditary inequality, so that castes can be considered as
micro-races. The mega-scale and mega-age of Hindu society add to the
image of the caste system as the most monstrous racism in world
history.

Indeed, if caste is arguably (though few would argue even
this much) preferable to outright slavery, even anti-racists consider
it a few notches worse than the apartheid as it existed in South
Africa. The whites oppressed the blacks, but they also provided some
elementary services to them, they gave black elites the sop of
becoming government officials in the "homelands", they did not
totally neglect them. The apartheid philosophy (like post-slavery
colonial policies elsewhere in Africa) was not to ignore the blacks
but to treat them as children who would benefit from white
supervision. By contrast, the international image of caste society
is one of extreme callousness, in which upper-caste people see lower-
caste people dying on their doorstep and remain unmoved. Doesn't
everybody outside India know that a Mother Teresa was needed to pick
up the paupers from the gutter where the smug upper-caste Hindus left
them to rot?

Another common anachronism in the Hindu position is to
identify the Christian missionary apparatus as "white". This
does of
course have a basis in historical reality but is becoming
increasingly inaccurate. Christian missionaries in Asia are now
typically Koreans or Filipinos or Keralites, not whites. And don't
say that they are only the infantry: in most Churches you see them
rising through the ranks. Remember how in the Anglican Church,
conservative African bishops formed a formidable bloc opposing the
Anglo-American progressives on issues of women priests and acceptance
of homosexuality. At any rate, these non-white converts have
interiorized the faith and the missionary zeal, just as the white
North-Europeans (the demographic mainstay of the US Baptists and
other missionary powerhouses) had at one time interiorized
Christianity after learning it from Mediterranean missionaries, who
in turn had it from the Jewish-born "first Christians". It is
no use
denying that Christianity has morphed across racial frontiers several
times already, and that it is repeating this process right now. Even
the remaining white Church leaders are clever enough to send coloured
Church spokesmen to interreligious forums where race could be an
issue, so Hindus won't be able to use the anti-white line against
them.

As for the anti-caste mobilization, millions of blacks too have
accepted the idea that caste is a form of slavery and racism. Just
as millions of Scheduled Caste converts who had never thought of
caste in terms of race have by now interiorized the idea that caste
is the ultimate in racism. You won't shock them into silence with
references to white injustice. On the contrary, to them the struggle
against caste oppression is simply the continuation of the historical
struggle against slavery and apartheid.

So, that in my opinion is what Hindus are up against. The Christian
missionaries are nothing if not clever. They sail with the opinion
winds and have ably made the switch from colonial racism to
postcolonial anti-racism, and now they are using this new line with
good effect against Hindu society. Digging up the dirt on "white
Christian" history will only evoke a yawn, as that dirt has been
dished out already all over the official textbooks and media in
Christian countries. If Hindus want to stop the gains continually
made by the Christians in the battle for the souls, there is no
alternative to the laborious task of (1) informing the world about
the more complex and less extreme reality of the caste system in
history and in the present; (2) actually reforming society to the
point where caste oppression is only a memory,-- and ensuring that
the world knows about this; and (3) refocusing the Hindu-Christian
struggle to its proper doctrinal level, where the defining Christian
teachings can be exposed as the unhistorical claims and irrational
beliefs that they really are. Plus, of course, reaching out to the
converts who are willing or eager to return to the Hindu fold. These
are big and demanding jobs, but carry a better promise of success
than locking yourself in a smug self-assurance of how evil Christians
are.